Discuss your future and complete health dentistry, teledentistry and more to save and extend lives with Patti DeMatteis, ASDH, RDH.
Patti DeMatteis, ASDH, RDH practiced dental hygiene in private practice for 25 years before founding Dental Hygiene Excellence in 1997 to make a difference in dentistry. Her passion lies in coaching her hygiene colleagues to renew their passion for the merit of their work and making it easier to do every day! She is a huge advocate for the oral-systemic health movement, a very proud founding member of AAOSH, a Bale Doneen preceptor, and a managing partner of the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention Center of Central Ohio where on a good day they save a smile, but on a great day, they save a life! Medical dental collaboration is her goal for better patient management and outcomes and the future of health care!
You don't want to miss this!
Video transcription:
Liz Lundry, RDH - “Hello. Welcome to the StellaLife Innovators series. Today we're going to be featuring Patti DeMatteis. Patti is a hygienist and an educator, and in 1997, she founded Dental Hygiene Excellence and she and her team provide training for dental teams so they can use a comprehensive approach to periodontal and dental treatment to provide dental hygiene excellence. She's going to be talking about complete health dentistry, including medical and dental collaboration, so that we can help our patients achieve not only the best possible oral health, but also the best overall health and longevity. Let's welcome Patti DeMatteis.”
Patti DeMatteis, ASDH, RDH - “Thank you, Liz. I am so excited to talk to you guys today about the future of dental hygiene care. As oral systemic providers, we are going to survive, we're going to have a wonderful future practicing complete health dentistry and collaborating with the medical community and the extended health care teams for every patient for much, much better results for every patient. So covid has absolutely knocked the breath out of dentistry for a while now but we are back on our feet, we will survive this. We've survived bacterias, viruses, infectious diseases for years. In the 80s, we survived the AIDS epidemic. At that time, I had practiced for twelve years without scrubs, jackets, glasses, masks, anything, gloves. And so I would go home and feed my children, bathe them, read them a bedtime story, and then take off my clinical clothes. So we've come a long way and we survived that. We'll survive this. We are stepping up our PPE, and I'd love to give a shout out to all of the clinicians out there that are having a hard time with it. It's not easy, and I understand that. So we're trying to reduce the time that the patient's actually in the office, which means new protocols, and we have to make every minute count in the appointment so that we can give the best care under the new circumstances. So there's three things I think that are really good that have come out of covid, and one is that the patients have become so much more aware of how they have to have a really good, strong immune system and how critical good oral health is to that immune system. And back in March, when we all had to shut down, our client hygienists were calling from all over the country, were calling their patients and telling them that they were going to have to postpone their appointments till they didn't really know when, we didn't know what was going on, and the patients were so concerned. It was just really heartwarming that they responded in a way like, "Oh, my goodness, please get me in as soon as you get back. I don't want to get behind on my oral health", and then when they did come in, they did present with new needs. They were very needy because they had been so stressed and maybe didn't have the best habits with staying home, not getting out of our routine. So they have come in with some active disease again. The other good thing that's come out of it is the utilization of tele dentistry and tele medicine. Those two services have been on the back burner for a long time and there are so many benefits to the patient and to the practice. For the patients, it gives them better access to care, it makes it more affordable for them, and it is up close and personal. We had a cardiologist say when he shut his practice down, he was going to have to be on Zoom or some kind of virtual class setting for his appointments. He was just like, "Listen, I'm not techie. I don't know how to do Zoom. This is not going to work for me" but then in about three weeks time, he came back to us and he was like, "Oh, my goodness, I don't think I've ever looked my patients in the eye like that before ''. So he felt it was very up close and personal, and it was working. We know that there's so many people out there that don't get the care that they need. And so, being able to offer tele dentistry and telemedicine is going to be very beneficial for everybody. And the other thing that we found that it does is it gives us an opportunity to get that healthcare team we talked about together for a consultation and a treatment plan for the patient. That's going to give them so much better results as we work together. There's a lot of services. I know people have said to me, "What in the world can you do with tele dentistry?" But there's a list of things that we can do. It's very surprising, really, how much we can get done. We can absolutely do a great assessment, we can do some administrative tests before they get in the office, which is, we're trying to cut down the clinical time for their safety. You can absolutely start making a nice relationship with a patient. We can do the covid pre-appointment interview about symptoms and if they've traveled and those kinds of things. And there are so many home tests and things that we can do and using photos and keeping patients out of the emergency room to just go in and say, "I have an abscess tooth. Yeah, you do, and you need a prescription", we can do that over an assessment, a virtual assessment. And there are insurance codes for this. So there are insurance benefits that can be used to help make that happen. So the other great thing that happened with covid is the mask breath. We were actually called to be interviewed by a TV station about what can patients do? They're smelling their own bad breath behind masks. So can they use a mint? Should they rinse? What do you think they should do? So my thing is yeah, I mean, most bad breath is caused by food. Americans get up in the morning and have coffee first thing, and then they have maybe a garlic chicken salad for lunch and then an onion pizza for dinner. So, yeah, you're going to have probably a smelly breath at that point. But you know why? It can be from an unhealthy mouth, we know, and it can be from a systemic disease. So we know that chronic bad breath can be a hallmark symptom of diabetes and paranormal disease, which we know is typically a silent disease, it's very bi-relational, and we know that in America, diabetes and periodontal are a very big problem and one out of ten Americans are diabetic, one out of three are insulin resistant, which means they're not diabetic yet, but they're on their way, and 88% of our patients have periodontal disease at some level. We know that four out of five diabetics are going to have a heart attack or a stroke in their lifetime. And most of them, at least 50% of those patients are unaware because it's a silent disease they don't know unless we really do the right things to find out. The standard of care, unfortunately, just as a fasting sugar test about yearly and if you are under 126 and they say you're okay, there's no alarms that go off. But what we do know is that if you are around 100, if you're more than 90, you could be insulin resistant and that is such an opportunity. If you could find out that you're insulin resistant 20 years before you might become diabetic, you have a chance to turn that around. It absolutely is reversible, but there's a special test for that. So it's called a two hour glucose tolerance test, and it's the best way to diagnose diabetes and insulin resistance. So if you haven't had one of those, then we absolutely need to have one ourselves and then make sure that our patients have had that so that they know. So I am in the management of the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention Center of Central Ohio, and we are so lucky that we are one of the only clinics in the country that has a dentist and a medical doctor under the same roof. So our medical doctor is actually a cardiologist. He does a lot of really specialized inflammatory tests so that we can find out what the root causes of the heart attack and stroke might be and shut those down. Diabetes is a very common root cause. Most of our patients in the heart attack and stroke prevention side have been at least insulin resistant, if not diabetic. So we know that the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention Center is a concierge practice. So Dr. Goulder actually guarantees that if the patient has an event under his care with our program, the BaleDoneen method, then their fees will be returned to them for that year. So Dr. Goulder looks to us as the dental team and Dr. McClatchie's side of the practice to find out what might be driving inflammation in the arterial wall from the mouth. And so we know that there's about three major conditions that we really want to look for as root causes. One is perio, one is endo, and then the narrow airway or the sleep apnea. So every heart attack and stroke patient gets a dental exam and we do a cone beam and we look for endodontic lesions that might be re infected or just active and never been treated and we look at the airway to see how well the patient's breathing and that's standing up. So if they have an airway standing up, we know they might have a problem when they lay down. We look for carotid calcifications, we look for periodontal disease, oral cancer and check out their bite. So any of those things that might be driving inflammation, we want to know about it. So we do a special test, just like the two hour glucose test is a special test for diabetes. We do a special test for the perio, which is the oral DNA test, because we want to make sure that the patient has a proper diagnosis of perio and we know that pocketing and bleeding is not a way to diagnose. That's what we did for many years, and we know that that has something to do with it. But the real diagnosis is if there's high risk pathogens, oral pathogens causing the infection and how bad that infection is. We have all kinds of research that backs that up. Dr. Bale and Dr. Doneen, Dr. Vigerust had a study out that was published in the British Medical Journal in 2018, and it absolutely said that the oral pathogens are causal in three different ways of vascular disease. Also, the American Heart Association's Journal, The Circulation in 2013 was published an article saying that 50% of heart attacks could be triggered by an oral pathogen. And we know that sometimes when they do the carotid and they look at the blood clots that they do find live oral pathogens in those blood clots. So we know that the oral pathogens absolutely can cause vascular disease. So at the Complete Health Dentistry of Columbus, our dental side of the Heart attack and Stroke Prevention Center, we practice the DHE method for periodontal disease, and that method is test, treat, repopulate. So we test, we use oral DNA. There's all kinds of great labs. We use vital labs, Microlink DX. We use aura vital, Microgen DX, there are so many great labs out there that will help you get the right diagnosis for your patients paranormal disease. Then we have all kinds of treatment that we base on those tests or whatever their microbiome shows on their oral DNA test, or whatever oral pathogens they have, then we do what we call targeted treatment and we look at what treatment targets, what bacteria, what products target wet bacteria. We use five tip therapy, which is ultrasonics, air polisher, and then we use healing products like StellaLife. We have wonderful results with StellaLife. I just want to talk about StellaLife for a second because we know that we get such great accelerated healing when our patients use StellaLife and there's pain management in their gel, and also it just really helps the healing and the patient's comfort. So we love that, and then the passion for that company is to reduce opioid abuse, and that's dear to my heart. I think that's just a wonderful mission for that company, so I love supporting them, besides the great results that we get. And then also as part of our treatment, once we treat and get the bacteria and the pathogens, the high risk pathogens down, Then we want to keep them down and the only way we can do that, we know we've found such great results with using oral care probiotics. And so we use ProBioraPro, we use hyperbiotics, and we also give the patient gut probiotics to help keep their gut happy while we're treating their mouth. So I just want to put a shout out to all of you who are listening that the patient has an extended health care team and we could all work together. We've been doing it with Dr. Goulder, we've been doing it with Dr. Prichard, and it works beautifully to really work together and see what inflammation, blood tests, and what their oral health has to do with each other and give the patient targeted treatment based on that. There's so many people that could be part of the extended healthcare team that your patients have. We need a medical doctor. We need a lifestyle coach. We need a psycho social therapist. We need a dentist, maybe an endodontist, maybe a periodontist, a oral surgeon, and at least a sleep doctor. So we have a huge team of people that if we share the information with them and set up a consult, we could do the case review and come up with a comprehensive treatment plan that everybody knows what's going on, we're not working against each other and then follow up together. So I know that we have so many people out here in the BaleDomeen community, Which I'm so proud to be a perception of the BaleDomeen method and practicing that at the heart attack and stroke prevention center. And I know that we have AAOSH members on this call, and those two communities I know are looking for partners to collaborate with to get better results. So we'll see you on AAOSH. Stay healthy, stay well, and to the future of dental hygiene.”
Liz Lundry, RDH - “Thank you, Patti, for that great information. We at StellaLife would like to wish all of you a wonderful holiday holiday season. Please stay well and stay safe and join us next time.”